This is my first toy update, something I hope to make regular on this blog.  Today, I’m talking about the Hot Wheels Stunt Loop set or whatever it’s called.  $20 Gets you a 2′ piece of track, a loop, and a rubber-band-loaded car catapult to get the car moving.  The base of the loop can be rotated to switch from a loop to a jump.  Sort of.

The first time I rotated the loop to the ‘jump’ setting, it broke so that it can only be used as a loop.  Fine by me, but first sign of a piece of junk.  The catapult is too hard for a three-year-old to pull back on his own, which means hours of “Again, Daddy!!” hell for you.  The track doesn’t align with the loop well, something we had to fix (semi-permenantly) with scotch tape.  After an hour of play, the rubber band wore to the point where no car would execute the loop.  Replacement with a bigger band made it work again, but made it even more impossible for a kid to pull back the launcher.  (“Again, Daddy!!  Again!!”)

In short, this thing is a total piece of crap, and you should take your $20 to a garage sale and buy a box of old track to make a decent, gravity-powered racetrack for your kids.

Coming next week:  PlasmaCar review

Well, I invited all four of you to a birthday party in March, and two of you just ignored the invite.  Classy.  The other two of you enthusiastically accepted, promised to bring the whole family, and then didn’t show and didn’t call to cancel.  Very classy.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I can tell you that I have been very busy keeping our now-7-month-old along with the 3 year old, and Spring is looking to be a much better season than Winter was.  We will be planning an outing to Riverfront Park at the Navy Base in N Chas for this coming Saturday – weather permitting, of course – and if you all want to show up, please do.  We’ll probably head down there at about 10:30 or 11 am, stay long enough to have a quick picnic at least.  I’m not sure how many of you all get notified by posts on this blog, so I’ll email you all seperately too.

I have a boy who turned 3 in March, and we had a girl August 20, 2008. I live in the Park Circle Area of North Charleston and I will turn 41 years old in a few weeks. If you’re a stay at home dad and are going nuts trying to keep you kid(s) busy, post here by using the ‘comments’ link below, and let’s see if we can work out – can’t believe I’m saying it – a play date or something. I can be reached via email but am going to keep my address of this blog for now.